Introduction

Introduction

Article excerpt

The Mosaic issue that preceded this one, the conference special issue Following Derrida: Legacies, raises the question of writing as, in many ways, central to Jacques Derrida's work. The question emerges as central to the present issue as well: the following essays explore theories of writing as technology; claims about the relationship between writing and other media; theories of narrative, particularly in relation to individual and cultural memory; writing (poetry) as artistic expression; what Suzanne Rintoul calls the "tensions between orality and writing" (in the novels of Thomas King); and writing (the writer) as artifact. For instance, Tony Jackson in "'Graphism' and Story-time in Memento" sets aside Derrida's "poststructuralist understanding of the significance of writing" in favour of an approach to writing as a technology that "disembodies language by converting the sounds of speech into visual image." Through a discussion of the film Memento, Jackson relates this notion of writing-as-technology to photography and cinematography, which, as technology, disembody "looking," leading to a loss in our cognitive capacity, including our cognitively-based sense of time.

In "Word-Dust: William Burroughs's Multimedia Aesthetic," Daniel Punday reads Burroughs as a "multimedia" writer who, for reason of "his sophisticated, if at times incomplete, attempt to understand the nature of the physical act of writing," might well "serve as an icon of writing's relationship to other media at the turn of the millennium." Jessica Locheed offers another take on "multimedia" writing in "'Degas the Sonneteer': Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries and Building a New Aesthetic," which reads the poetry written by Degas late in his career through the perspective of themes he explored in his visual art, treating the oeuvre as a whole, and tracing its indebtedness to Mallarme's poetry and critical writing on dance. …